Useful tools and resources for web developers

Posted on Aug 07, 2017

Web design starts with the research, everything that you are going to put on your website, should be properly researched. And then we come up with an idea of how the website can be improvised. Then comes the designing part where we design the website and we wire-frame it. After the designing is done with proper User Interface and options, we start the coding. Coding generally requires a lot of work and patience, debugging and ensuring the proper output of the code. After the coding is done, we move forward toward testing our finished product when it comes to a testing phase.

Designing a website has several stages and one of the most crucial things to keep in mind while starting up a website is the color scheme of the website. Finalizing the color pallets for your website can be quite tricky sometimes, but to help the users, there are a lot of web tools and resources out there which will make this process a whole lot easier.

Design and Color

Adobe Kuler – one of such tool is the Adobe product called Adobe Kuler – A great tool that the Adobe offers its users for free of cost and which allows the members to create, upload and edit different color schemes of their own desire.

Colorzilla – the next tool to help the users with the color scheme of the website is Colorzilla chrome extension. This tool is more like the eye-dropper tool from the Photoshop but for your browser. You can pick up any color from any random page on your browser.

Dribbble.com – it is a very popular web-designing tool. You can explore many existing color schemes which are created by other designers from all over the world and pick up anything suitable according to your project. And the best part is that it’s free of cost.

Hues – this tool comes for $2.99. You can sample any color from any project you’re working on and it will give you the exact hexa code for that particular color.

Typography or Fonts

Typography is another very important and essential part of web designing process. It has a huge effect on the look and feel of your website. The first tool to help any web-designer with the typography is:

Google Web fonts – these free web fonts are provided by google for no cost at all, are absolutely free and incredibly easy and user-friendly to use and implement into your website or project. There are numerous web fonts you can find in it.

Font Squirrel – it is another free tool for the typography of your website. And also widely used by most of the web-designers as it is a high-quality tool with hand-picked fonts and also includes fonts for commercial use.

Lost Type – it is a simple foundry where you pay for what you want specifically in which you can customize your typography anyway you want and is one of its kind till now. It can cost you about $1. Any web designer with the use of this tool can push their web designs to the next level.

Typecast – earlier it costed for $29 per month, but the developers changed their pricing and made it a free tool. With $0 per month. It has a lot to offer with over 100,000 free web fonts, Google fonts + 3k licensed fonts from fonts.com and many more.

Typekit – one of the best place to find fonts for your web project. It is an online service which offers a subscription of high quality modern fonts. The fonts in typekit can be used directly on your websites or you can choose to sync them with your Adobe Creative Cloud account

Wireframe

Wireframing is a very important part in any type of webpage designing or screen design process. It allows you to manually define the information hierarchy of the design and making it easier for you to plan the layout according to how you want to use it to process your information. It’s one of the main parts of designing a website.

Balsamiq – A $79 tool is completely wilted when it comes to wireframing. It’s probably one of the best tools out there to wireframe your website. It comes with many pre-defined shapes and tools that will help you increase your workflow incredibly.

Macflow – Macflow is an online tool to wireframe your website. The best feature of all is the collaboration tool in it. You can allow other users to view the notes you have made as well as chat with them in live time about the functionality and UI decisions.

Google Draw – Google draw is passed on by a lot of web designers while. It offers its service entirely for free with an option to store your work online on a google drive which makes it quite accessible.

And of course the last one in the list and probably the most popular ones are the Adobe Photoshop, In-design and Fireworks which may cost you for a price of $49 / month.

Coding and Development Tools

Coding is one of the most complex parts of the process of developing a website. Here are some tools which will increase your workflow when it comes to coding:-

Coda 2 – if you literally sit and compare other code editors and the coda you will find that coda will always win. This may be a little new and for some users may be a completely different experience, but it is suggested that you give it a try. Best services aren’t for free and so isn’t the coda, it comes for the price of $99. You can try it for free for a limited trial period and later on if you like it you can purchase it.

SublimeText 3 – the sublime text editor is probably the only other editor up there with coda. There are many features and smooth UI of the tool which makes it a lot easier for you to concentrate on the coding and provides you with numerous editing options as well. It is available for cross platforms like Windows, Linux and OS X. This tool comes in both free and paid types with additional features for paid members. The pricing for this app is $70 per license.

Aptana Studio – a free alternative for text editors like the Sublime text and coda is the Aptana Studio. It is available for both Mac users and Windows users and has an amazing potential to code virtually any type of application that comes in your mind.

Cloud9 IDE – it is a tool that can help you to collaborate with others in small as well as big scale code projects. It also lets the developers around the world edit the same code and communicate and exchange ideas in real time. Code completion is also one of the best features along with the ability to code on two different projects side-by-side.

Visual Studio – one of the best tools for coding and editing with a lot of unique features that other competitor tools won’t have. The UI is extremely satisfying and user-friendly of course. The developers also provide its users with a customer support 24/7. Compiling, linking and debugging is a lot easier with this tool with code completion, prompts and proper solution to the errors in the code. It is an open source tool from Microsoft that has many smart features and has got inbuilt Git commands as well. The UI theme can be changed to either light or dark as per users convenience and this is one of the features that makes it stand out.

File Transfer Protocol Software

If you’re looking for an FTP client then below are the best FTP services and tools:

CyberDuck – probably the best ftp client in the market with a pricing of $23.99 and comes for both Mac and Window Platforms. There are infinite ways of connecting to the local servers as well as the web servers and access different devices via ssh and more.

Filezilla – it is another free alternative for CyberDuck and it is also an open source software. You can’t expect too much of features from it, but it gets the job done pretty well.

FireFTP – it is a free, secure and cross-platform compatible FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. It allow you to have easy and secure access to your designated file transfer protocol servers.

CuteFTP – it is a paid version of FTP software, you can easily create and schedule your transfer task with it. You can also reate scripts to regularly backup or synchronize your sites and fully monitor local folders for any changes.

Grid Tools

GuideGuide – apart from the fact that it is a free tool, GuideGuide is pretty awesome extension of photoshop. When it comes to editing with ease, with just one click you can create perfect grids, more accurate rows & columns, along with the perfect midpoints and baselines.

Columnal – this tool features extra functionality for application. it is a great tool for development of responsive web design as it makes grids flexible and change dynamically when you re-size your browser window.

Screenshot Tools

Lightshot – it is one of the most popular screenshot tools with an incredibly easy use and super user-friendly on screen editing. It has multiple features and all comes in for free. It is developed for both Mac and Windows users with multi-lingual support. When you press the print screen key on your keyboard, it will by default select the whole screen and you can proceed towards taking a screenshot as well as allow you to drag and select the area to take screenshot of, making it very useful and a must have tool.

Awesome Screenshot – it is a great browser extension which enables you to capture, edit and save your current chosen screen area or your entire screen. It have various screen options available and this tool also lets you save your files to your computer or your own Google Drive account.

Windows built-in – alternately you can use Windows built-in snap shot to take a screenshot of your desktop items. However it is not possible to make any adjustments, the snap shot will be saved in your computer picture folder.

File Storage or Backup

DropBox – it is a very simple tool for storing your stuff online on the cloud and works with almost all types of platforms and devices like iOS, Android, LINUX and Windows. It can be explained as a folder and anything you stick into it whether it is picture, music, video or any documents is automatically synchronized to the cloud. it is a free option to 2 GB and if you need more than that then you can get it for very reasonable prices. It also offers ways file sharing, uploads and downloads with a great UI and speed functionality.

Google Drive – you can use your Google account to get free Google Drive to store and access files wherever you are. You’ll get 15GB of free storage which covered from all your Google apps account such as Gmail and Google photos.

One Drive – it is Microsoft’s free online storage. You’ll need a Hotmail or Live mail account to get access to one drive storage, since it’s free, you can setup easily with your Microsoft supported emails.